Silence (21 page)

Emma almost felt sorry for Eric. Almost. “He’s staying, Amy’s staying in case you were about to be stupid enough to suggest she leave, and Alison’s staying because I’m going to tel her everything anyway, and it’s just easier not to get who-said-what confused. That about covers our side of things.” She glanced at Alison. “Did you fil Amy in on everything?”

Alison. “Did you fil Amy in on everything?”

Alison nodded, looking slightly relieved.

“Then we’re good to go with your side of things.”

Eric and Chase glanced at each other; Chase shrugged.

Amy cut in. Given the number of sentences they’d managed to get through uninterrupted, this was more than expected. “What exactly did Longland do to my brother?”

“We’re not sure. Not exactly. Which is to say, we don’t have a good way of explaining how it works. We’ve seen it before,”

Eric added, speeding up slightly as Amy opened her mouth, “and as I said, it’s a compulsion. A control.”

“You said he normaly wouldn’t do something like this—he’d just make it look like it was Skip’s idea. Skip’s not the brightest guy in the world. This is the type of stupid he might believe could be his own.”

Eric nodded, wary now. Emma liked that, about him. He wasn’t stupid.

“But if he needed to do something in the house, he’d do something worse. Which he clearly did.”

“More or less.” On the other hand, he looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“So Chase and Emma went upstairs to search the house, and Chase came back and puled you in. What did you find?”

They looked at each other again, and any sympathy Emma felt for either of them evaporated. Michael, however, had stopped fidgeting so badly. She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

shoulder.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing upstairs,” Emma interjected. “Chase, you caled Longland a Necromancer. Maybe we can start with that.”

AMY TURNED TO LOOK AT EMMA. “A…

Necromancer.”

“Pretty much.”

“So…what Alison said about your dad in the hospital—that had something to do with Necromancy?”

Emma frowned. “I don’t think so. I think he’s just dead.”

“Oh. Okay then.”

Emma winced. “Yes, yes, I know it sounds insane.”

“It sounds worse than insane, but at least it hasn’t descended “It sounds worse than insane, but at least it hasn’t descended into B-movie badness. Yet. We checked the hedge while you were upstairs; Longland broke a few branches. The grass is mostly okay.”

“How mostly?”

“I think I’l survive. I’m not sure Skip wil, if we don’t have an explanation that won’t get us both thrown into an insane asylum.

And no, before you ask, I am not teling my parents about any of this unless they absolutely need to know.” She added, “You haven’t told your mom, have you?”

Emma shook her head.

“Alison?”

“No.”

They al turned to look at Michael. Michael looked mildly confused. “I told my mother about Emma’s dad. Why aren’t you teling your parents?”

“Our parents wil worry so much they probably won’t let us out of the house again, except for school,” Emma told him.

“What—what did your mother say?”

“Not very much. She asked me not to tel my dad. She told me I must be mistaken. I told her she could ask your mother.

Did she?”

“No.” Emma thanked god for smal mercies. “But she probably doesn’t want your dad to worry.” Because she doesn’t believe you, and she’s pretty certain he won’t either , Emma thought. This was not, however, something you could say to Michael unless you wanted to upset him.

to Michael unless you wanted to upset him.

“When the rest of you have finished, you can tel me when you’d like me to start.”

The girls turned to look at Eric. He lifted his hands in instant surrender.

“Start with Necromancers, if you can’t start with Longland.

What, exactly, is a Necromancer, anyway? Some special type of —of dead person?” Emma tried unsuccessfuly not to rest her hands on her hips; she was aware that this made her look a little bit too much like her mother. Or an Amy wannabe at this moment.

“No. They’re not dead. They’re very much alive.”

“Alive and something that no one else has ever heard about.”

“Not and survived, no. Possibly not and died; they don’t realy feel the need to explain their existence to ordinary people.”

“So…they’re like a secret society?” Amy walked over to the patio furniture, snagged herself a chair, and dragged it back. She sat down.

Chase and Eric exchanged another glance. Chase was clearly torn between finding this hilarious and finding it infuriating, and he hadn’t decided which.

“Ye-es.”

“And people who can see the dead, for whatever reason, are naturally Necromancers?” Emma decided that a chair was a good idea. She did not, however, move.

“No,” Eric said, as Chase said, “Yes.”

“Eric can see the dead. Eric is, I’m assuming, not a Necromancer.”

Necromancer.”

Silence.

“We al saw your dad,” Michael offered. “I don’t think I’m a Necromancer. Eric, what is a Necromancer? I know what they probably are in D20 rules,” he added, to be helpful.

“They’re not like that. They can’t summon an army of zombies or skeletons. Science wil get there first. And no, Michael, you are definitely not a Necromancer. Neither is Mrs. Hal or Alison or the other people who probably saw Emma’s dad.”

“But Emma?” he added, with just a trace of anxiety.

“Emma,” Chase said, while Eric was struggling for words, “is a Necromancer.”

If, as they say, looks could kil, Chase, or what was left of Chase, would have falen over on the spot. Chase, however, squared his shoulders and met Eric’s furious glance without blinking. “She is,” he said quietly, shoving his hands into his pockets.

“Are you teling this story, or am I?”

“You are, of course. If I were, I wouldn’t have taken this long to get to the damn point.”

Emma thought Eric was going to punch him, and Chase, judging by the way he shifted his stance, thought so too. “Eric,”

she said.

He lowered his hands. He didn’t manage to uncurl them.

“I’m a Necromancer?”

The look he gave her made her turn away for a moment.

Sometimes you couldn’t look too closely at another person’s Sometimes you couldn’t look too closely at another person’s pain.

“Yes.”

“And this means you have to—” she broke off, looking at her friends. “Tel me.”

“The headaches weren’t headaches. They weren’t a concussion. Some people have a lot of trouble adjusting to what they see when they’re first coming into their power. Your brain builds new channels, new ways of assimilating visual information, but it’s complicated and it hurts. While you’re doing this, you can often halucinate, hear voices, see things. It’s both painful and confusing, but if you have no guide, if you have no information, those wil shut down on their own as your brain learns to ignore the incoming information. It’s almost natural.”

“That’s what you were hoping for.”

He nodded, closed his eyes, turned his face away.

“He knew it was too late,” Chase told her. “He just doesn’t want—”

Eric stepped on his foot, hard.

“What is it that Necromancers can do that makes them so dangerous?” Emma found it easier to ask this of Chase. Possibly because it didn’t seem to hurt him so much to answer, and possibly because he was stil recovering from the very necessary stomping.

“You can ask that after tonight?”

She grimaced. “Good point. But—how can they do it?”

“They take their power from the dead.”

“From the dead.” Emma’s eyes widened. “You mean like the “From the dead.” Emma’s eyes widened. “You mean like the dead in the room?”

“Like the dead that are folowing you, yes.”

Amy said, “Alison, do you see any dead people?”

“No.”

“Michael?”

“No.”

“Okay. Just checking, because neither do I.” Amy shifted in her chair. Emma had to give her this: when she wasn’t in the mood to be impressed, it took a lot to impress her.

“With the dead you have folowing you,” Chase continued, “you could probably destroy this whole block without blinking and stil have power left to go home.”

“I can walk home from here.”

“That’s not the home I was talking about.”

“It’s the only home I have.” But she turned to look at the dead. Because Chase was right. They were folowing her. She frowned. “Emily,” she whispered.

A fifth ghost appeared, almost shyly. “Yes?”

“Sorry. I—I almost forgot about you, and I wanted to see if you were stil here.”

“I can’t leave,” the girl replied.

“Why not?”

“You hold me.”

“Emma,” Amy said sharply, “You are creeping me the hel out. Who are you talking to, exactly?”

Emma grimaced. “I don’t know if this wil work,” she said.

Emma grimaced. “I don’t know if this wil work,” she said.

Eric said, “Don’t. Em. Don’t.”

But Emma reached out with her hand, palm up, to Emily, who hesitated for just a minute before she reached out and grasped Emma’s hand with her own. Hers was cold. To Emma’s eyes, nothing had changed.

But Amy’s intake and Alison’s soft rush of breath—exhale or inhale, Emma couldn’t tel—told her that things had changed for her friends.

Michael said, “She doesn’t look dead.”

“No. Thank god. I don’t think I could stand to see corpses everywhere. This is Emily Gates. Emily, these are my friends.

This is Michael,” she added, because Michael had walked toward Emily. He was tal, certainly taler than Emma, Amy, or Alison.

“Helo,” Michael said quietly. He held out his hand.

Emily looked at it and then shook her head. “I can’t,” she told him.

“Oh.” He let his hand drop. “It’s okay,” he added because she seemed to be unhappy about the admission. “Emma, why can we see her now?”

“I don’t know. But in the hospital—I touched my dad.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“She did,” Eric replied. His voice was very quiet. “But not in a way you could see, not then. Until she touched him, you couldn’t see him.”

“Why does her touch make them visible?”

“It doesn’t. Not exactly. She’s using a very, very smal part of “It doesn’t. Not exactly. She’s using a very, very smal part of their power to make them visible to you. To everyone here.”

Emma’s hand tightened slightly, and then she let go. “Emily, how do I let you go? What am I holding?”

Emily frowned. “I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Eric’s voice was rough. “You can’t let them go here, even if you could figure out how to do it.

Longland’s stil alive, and he’s stil out there. You let them go, he’l probably be able to pick them up again, and we cannot face him when he’s wielding that kind of power. It’s not easy for him to pick up the dead this way. It is not trivial.”

Emma nodded and turned to the other four. She introduced herself, and she received their names. The children were hard for her. They were just too young to be caught up in al of this. Too damn young, she thought, to die.

But they were dead. “Do you want to meet my friends?” she asked them softly.

“Don’t.” Eric again. “Emma—don’t do this.”

Setting her jaw, she touched each by the hand, and she introduced Georges, Catherine, Margaret, and Suzanne, to her friends. She introduced the two women, Margaret and Suzanne, first, and then the children, because she knew what effect they would have on Michael.

Michael liked children, possibly because there was something in children that was not yet entirely fettered by social convention, and he responded to it. Her hands—she introduced Georges and Catherine at the same time—were numb by the time he had finished asking them questions, because he did ask. They finished asking them questions, because he did ask. They answered, slowly at first. But as they talked, they grew more animated, and Michael, forgetting for a moment that they were dead, started to play, to make faces, to try to get them to laugh.

It was heartbreaking to watch him. It was worse to watch them absorb this playfulness, because they wanted it so badly, and this fact was completely obvious to Emma.

It was obvious, Emma thought, glancing at Alison and Amy, to al of them. Alison approached them as wel, but she was more reserved. She retreated because Michael was making them laugh, and when they laughed—they didn’t seem dead.

But when Alison turned to Emma, her eyes were filmed with tears that she was trying not to shed. “Em.”

Emma nodded.

“How can we help them?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s got to be something we can do. Is the little boy in the burned out building like this?”